Maximum PC

Hello;

I've spent the night googling and trying to pull all of the pieces together but I still have a few holes I'm hoping some one can fill in.

Last night I wiped out over 2TB worth of data when I was writing to my 3TB HDD. The used space crossed the 2TB mark and blew away the GPT and essentially "corrupted" the HDD.

From what I've read this is because 1) I had the HDD set to Dynamic rather than Basic (I don't know why I had set it like this, there was no need) and then 2) I didn't have IRST installed at all.

What I fail to understand is what IRST has to do with anything? I didn't realize it was such a vital component - I thought it was just an add on if you were using SSD caching or something...??

Specs are:
Windows 7 64bit
ASUS p8z68-v Pro
OS resides on an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD
"Work" drive is 2x 256GB Samsung 840 SSDs in RAID0
Storage HDD:
1.5TB
2.0TB
3.0TB

Thanks in Advance!

IRST is only needed if you're using ACHI. Even then, Windows has its own ACHI driver.

If you want to try to recover the data, see if TestDisk will work.

Thanks!

I"ve actually got recovery software but unfortunately nothing was recoverable. Well - I should say nothing was recoverable in a good enough state. All files were re-named to their extension + a number. So it's easier to restore from back up (which I've got thankfully)

Because of the SSD raid I have the BIOS set to RAID (yes that's the actual option checked). But I've never heard if IRST being required before. I've been asking around the office and at least I'm not the only one (in good company)

Sorry, that wasn't clear:

this is all about the 3TB HDD.

While writing data to the 3TB HDD I used more than 2TB worth of space on it. This is what triggered the initial issue - using more than 2TB on the 3TB HDD.

I've been told that IRST is the SATA III driver. Without version 10.X or greater of IRST installed then you will encounter this issue when the used portion of a 3TB (or larger) HDD crosses the 2TB mark